Two new pieces up in the Words Without Borders “Foreign Correspondents†issue this month, one by Gébé and the other by François Vallejo. Gébé, a satirist after my own heart, looks into the mysterious activities of the International Bureau for Front Location, while Vallejo chronicles the 1988 fire that consumed the Chiado district of Lisbon.
Editorial cartoonist Gébé’s piece, featuring a short introduction by yours truly, is taken from his prose collection Not-Quite-Botched Dispatches (But a Hard Sell for the Nightly News), originally Reportages pas vraiment ratés mais difficile à vendre à France Soir, reprinted in 2001 by Le Diléttante (that last link for readers of French).
The excerpt by François Vallejo is the opening to his 2008 novel The Burning of the Chiado (L’Incendie du Chiado) from Éditions Viviane Hamy.
Check’em out!